I’ve been using UNIX/Linux for more than ten years. Over that time I’ve accumulated a huge range of tricks and hacks to make things work, so it was with some frustration that I found that I couldn’t turn off the system bell on my laptop running Ubuntu Dapper. My first approach was to use xset(1), which had worked in the past. It was installed (including the man page “man xset” ) but ineffective. Even as root at boot-time. None of the obvious commands worked. None of the several non-obvious commands worked either.
This morning, while in the “Shock of the Old 6 Conference : Shock of the Social” a Oxford, I decided that if I couldn’t disable the bell (which sounds every time I mis-type an emacs(1) command sequence), I was going to have to switch from emacs to a different text editor.
System -> Preferences -> Sound -> System Beep was the fix. For six months of laptop ownership I’d been looking for a command line solution and it had been in the menus all the time.
Just call me an old-timer.
Randy informs me that on his IBM laptop, the hardware mute button mutes the system bell. On my Dell D620, it mutes audio port but not the system bell. Randy had also found the menu option.
Tag: shock2007
Thanks, that’s saved me a bunch of frustration only from vi beeping at me rather than emacs.
Thanks! Helped a lot. Had headphones on… using ubuntu linux and the system bell was causing some serious eardrum damage!